Re: Hadoop cluster hardware planning and provisioning?

For Hadoop Cluster planning, we should try to find the answers to below questions. The accurate or near accurate answers to these questions will derive the Hadoop cluster configuration.

1. What is the volume of the incoming data – or daily or monthly basis? What will be the frequency of data arrival? 2. What will be my data archival policy? Would I store some data in compressed format? 3. What will be the replication factor – typically/default configured to 3. 4. How many tasks will each node in the cluster run? 5. How much space should I reserve for the intermediate outputs of mappers – a typical 25 -30% is recommended. 6. How much space should I reserve for OS related activities? 7. How much space should I anticipate in the case of any volume increase over days, months and years? Once we get the answer of our drive capacity then we can work on estimating – number of nodes, memory in each node, how many cores in each node etc. Let’s take the case of stated questions.

Number of Node:- As a recommendation, a group of around 12 nodes, each with 2-4 disks (JBOD) of 1 to 4 TB capacity, will be a good starting point. 216 TB/12 Nodes = 18 TB per Node in a Cluster of 12 nodes So we keep JBOD of 4 disks of 5TB each then each node in the cluster will have = 5TB*4 = 20 TB per node. So we got 12 nodes, each node with JBOD of 20TB HDD. Number of Core in each node:- A thumb rule is to use core per task. If tasks are not that much heavy then we can allocate 0.75 core per task. Say if the machine is 12 Core then we can run at most 12 + (.25 of 12) = 15 tasks; 0.25 of 12 is added with the assumption that 0.75 per core is getting used. So we can now run 15 Tasks in parallel. We can divide these tasks as 8 Mapper and 7 Reducers on each node. So till now, we have figured out 12 Nodes, 12 Cores with 20TB capacity each. Memory (RAM) size:- This can be straight forward. We should reserve 1 GB per task on the node so 15 tasks means 15GB plus some memory required for OS and other related activities – which could be around 2-3GB. So each node will have 15 GB + 3 GB = 18 GB RAM. Network Configuration:- As data transfer plays the key role in the throughput of Hadoop. We should connect node at a speed of around 10 GB/sec at least.